I am almost flabbergasted by the spin and blunt-face upon which this news is delivered. We were just discussing the pot calling the kettle black with Apple / Adobe and now Microsoft have also come out in favour of a closed video format for an open web--IE9's HTML5 video support will allow H264 only. Update Now that the initial shock is over, I've rewritten the article to actually represent news rather than something on Twitter.

Still, I'm very much in favour of just ignoring the patents. H.264 is sufficiently better and more widely used than any alternatives that the patent issues don't really bother me.

Doesn't matter if patent issues bother you or not ... HTML5 is not your specification, and you are not a provider of a web browser.

After all, MP3 and DVD support pose similar legal problems which have been effectively solved in Linux - you can just download a plugin.

Not the point, at all. My Linux system actually includes two perfectly legal h264 decoders. The first one is embedded in my legally-purchased ATI video card hardware. The second one I downloaded from Adobe's website, it is contained within Adobe's Flash plugin for Linux (just as an equivalent is contained within Adobe's Flash plugin for Windows). Apparently, Adobe pays the MPEG LA license fee for these freely-downloadable plugins.

The problem is that no individuals or non-profit groups, charities, very small businesses, underdeveloped countries etc, etc can afford to pay the fees to encode video in h264. Therefore, whole sections of the web community will be disenfranchised from being web video producers.

Therefore, just like every other protocol standard used on the web (e.g. HTML, CSS, SVG, PNG, ECMAscript, DOM etc), the web video codec standard MUST be royalty-free.

I'll repeat it for the many people who just don't seem to grok this point: "the web video codec standard MUST be royalty-free".